Submarine documents leak: $50bn down gurgler if French can’t keep secret

There is almost no breach of ­national security more serious than the disclosure of the stealth secrets of a country’s submarine fleet.

A submarine is only as effective as the secrets it keeps. If an enemy knows those secrets, the game is over. As the old wartime saying goes, “loose lips sink ships.”

That is why Australia should be deeply concerned by the Snowden-style leak of 22,400 secret documents written by the same French shipbuilder, DCNS, that will design Australia’s future submarine fleet.

The leaked DCNS documents describe in excruciating detail — line by line and bolt by bolt — the entire combat abilities of India’s new six-boat Scorpene submarine fleet. It has dealt a hammer blow to India’s national security and it begs the question; if it has happened to India, why couldn’t it happen to us?

Australia cannot afford to spend $50 billion on the biggest defence project in the nation’s history only to have it potentially compromised by sloppy security about confidential information.

The news will further hurt France’s reputation in this regard, given that several senior US naval figures are known to have made clear to their Australian counterparts their belief that France was careless with its military secrets.

DCNS claims that this sort of leak could not happen on the Australian submarine project because there are tighter controls on it than was the case in the Indian project.

The company says that with the Australian project DCNS is responsible for safeguarding sensitive information both in France and in Australia, whereas in India it was merely “the provider and not the controller of technical data”.

The comment seems to imply that DCNS thinks the leak originated from India rather than France. I have been told by well-placed sources that the leak originated from France in 2011 and this is further supported by the fact that the leaked data also contain details of DCNS projects unrelated to India.

India will rightly be furious about the leak — as will Malaysia, Chile and Brazil, which operate Scorpene submarines — and we can expect a round of finger pointing between Paris and Delhi as to who might be responsible.

But the bottom line is that 22,400 highly sensitive DCNS documents that should not be in the public arena have somehow made their way across the world and into the wrong hands.

Defence will be tempted to jump into the bunker with this leak and pretend it has not happened but in fact it should discuss the issue urgently with DCNS. The government and the Defence hierarchy have invested much political capital in persuading the public that they have chosen correctly when they announced France as the winner over Germany and Japan to design Australia’s new submarines. Time may well prove that France was the right choice for Australia — DCNS makes excellent submarines — but right now it needs to work hard to convince the rest of the world that it can keep a secret.